The Asia region includes support for Compute Engine, Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL.

One feature distinguishing its Asia zones from European and US zones is that instances created in Asia will use newer Ivy Bridge processors, whereas instances in other regions use Sandy Bridge.

The two Asia regions also launch with Google’s new software defined networking stack, Andromeda, which currently power its us-central1-b and europe-west1-a zones and will be coming to other zones in the next few months.

The Asia zones also come with Google’s ‘Transparent maintenance’ service, which should keep workloads up and running even during maintenance. It’s currently available in the US and Asia but not Europe.

Google’s move follows the recent round of cloud platform price cuts from it, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft for Azure. It also brings Google’s cloud platform closer to Amazon Web Services, which has had Asia Pacific zones (Japan and Singapore) for some time and has more recently launched in Australia as well as a preview of AWS Beijing region for China.

Microsoft has also been filling out its zones in the Asia Pacific, including through the general availability of launch of Azure in China to general availability last month. It plans to launch a Brazil region this year.